Because I am downloading royalty free sound effects for this game I need the ability to edit these sounds. As they may not be up to standard to to my specification for this task I will use Audacity.

Audacity is a free open source sound editing software capable of not only cutting sounds but also making adjustments to them such as fade, pitch or volume.

To illustrate how I will be using Audacity, I have created a production log of me editing just one sound within the game. If you listen closely to looped sound in the video below you can clearly hear an click or artifact on each loop.

This artifact is down to bad editing, essentially the volume at the start or end of the loop is not zero so it does not seamlessly loop. I will therefore use Audacity to fix this, the process is illustrated below.

Once the file is open in Audacity a wave will be displayed, this wave represents the peaks and troughs of the sound. By zooming(Ctrl + 1) into the begging or end of the sound wave we can see it more detail.

The images above show the zoomed view of the sound wave, the first image represents the very start of the sound as shown the volume comes in at 0 and then begins to change. However, the second image represents the end of the sound and this does not end on a volume of 0 and therefore the sound will not loop as the volume will jump from some value to 0 instantly as the sound starts. To fix this then we can use Audacity’s fade feature to fade out the volume at the end.

By using Audacity’s Fadeout tools we have managed to cancel any volume at the end of the sound wave, the same process can be used for the beginning if need be. The resulting fixed sound can be heard below.

Audacity has range of audio tools which I will utilize during the development of this game. This post shows only one of these processes, buts demonstrates my typical use of Audacity.